It’s A Long Way to Tipperary
Matthew Finley
Some say that war is hell. I beg to differ; I have seen both and know the difference. I may forget the gas and the shells and the screams, but that thing will never leave me.
31 October, 1916.
I struggle to write on the page as rain comes down softly, pooling in the rim of my helmet and pouring down like a gutter. I tilt my head to my right to redirect the flow and continue writing.
We planned the offensive for midnight. The regiment planned to capture a hill that will break through German lines.
I sit for a minute, struggling for words to say. Two hours until I go over the top; the consequences were not lost on me. I still remember vividly sitting in a shell-hole with my old schoolmate; we’d enlisted together in the war. He’d planned on being a schoolteacher, I an author. He would teach no more, as I had struggled in vain to hold his intestines in his abdomen. I’d lied to his mother when she asked how Victor had died- Quick and painless was the lie I gave.
I cannot help being suspicious of this operation. The Germans have been too quiet lately.
I hadn’t heard gunshots all day. Quite odd; a day without gunshots was like a day without a sunrise. I hadn’t heard anything of German armistice, though.
Corporal Briggs rounds the corner, head low, whistling an out-of-tune rendition of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” He’d been a quartet singer in a prior life, and the way he altered those high notes made the merry tune seem sarcastic and dark, in line with the jaded sense of humor we all have. We share eye contact; his eyes are heavy with grief for a man so young. I wonder if he thinks the same.
“Hour and a half.” He is cold and unemotional as he gives the order, leaning into the trench wall like a gentleman trying to seduce the ladies at a bar. “You ready?”
I nod. “Not many options about it.”
Briggs chuckles softly and lights a cigarette, one of the few remaining joys of trench life. “Well, I’ll leave you to that.”
The anxiety of waiting for my fate turns the seconds to hours, and yet it is still too soon when I hear the order to go over the top.
As I lean against the muddy trench wall, the whining of incoming mortars and the chest-shaking boom of artillery suddenly cease as my pocket watch strikes midnight. A whistle, sharp and ear-piercing, splits the night in the instant of quiet on the western front. I pull myself above the mud embankments, sprinting forward with my Enfield, bayonet fixed.
It is only when I reached a shell hole when I realize that there is silence. For a moment I think I am deaf, and then I hear the sound of the rain cascading down on my helmet. There is no gunfire, no screams, no artillery, only ear-breaking silence.
I weave from foxhole to foxhole, taking cover where I could. I know enough to know never to trust silence—a fickle mistress, here one second and gone in a hail of lead the next. In the darkness, I almost run into a jungle of razor wire. Taking a quick scan of the surroundings, I manage to find a gap in the wire through what little moonlight I had. The flares had yet to arrive.
Just like crossing a street, I look down both sides of the trench I was about to hop into. I can see none of the Kaiser’s men.
No machine guns, no artillery, no rifles, and now no Germans. It seems as if I am fighting the war by myself.
I hop into the trench, and am met with a crunch when my feet hit the ground. I look down, only to be greeted by a prostrate skeleton dressed in German fatigues, with my feet having punched through its rib cage like thin floorboards. A helmet lay close by, a waterlogged photo of a young fraulein floating in the pooled rainwater. A trickle of water pours from a pair of holes in the metal. I look around again, the pale moonlight illuminating harshly the walls of this foreign trench.
The German tunnels are only about 200 meters from the hole in the ground I call home, yet they are totally foreign to me. The mud seems oppressive here, like it too is trying to kill me.
I round the corner and see a German soldier sitting in the muck, his eyes staring blankly ahead, face covered in blood. His helmet was missing, revealing scraggly, filthy blonde hair that barely poked through the filth covering his body. In a knee-jerk reaction, I lunge forward, impaling the soldier. The boy flops over to one side; as he twitches his last, I find it odd how he had made no attempt to fight me. As I inspect the corpse, however, I am filled with shock when my eyes fall across the German’s face.
Suddenly, I encounter a most horrid sight of a German ripped apart by his own hands.
Claw marks riddled the boy’s face, but these marks were not from an animal. The blood on his own fingers confirm that to me. Deep gashes ran across his face, and his eyes were primally ripped to shreds, reduced to giblets of gore. His mouth was agape in a permanent scream and blood oozed from his mouth as if he’d vomited or coughed it up.
I step away from the body, my brain incapable of processing what I just saw, before hearing a heart-stopping scream. Immediately, I sprint towards the sound; it was the only indication of life I’d sensed since I’d gone over the top. I wind through these vacant German trenches in a vain search for some form of human life. If enemy, I could earn my pay; if friendly, I would receive some comfort from this unnerving solitude.
As I sprint down these unfamiliar above-ground catacombs, more and more bodies began to pass. They were likewise mutilated as the one before, but the initial shock of seeing the first one did nothing to lessen the horror of seeing men with caved-in skulls as if struck by a warhammer, limbs ripped off not by artillery but rather like a Christmas turkey, intestines dangling from torsos as if ripped apart by a bear. These mauled corpses become more and more frequent as I sprint down the long, winding passageway.
The horror of seeing all those bodies, though, cannot compare to the mind-altering horror that caused it. I do not blame that boy for clawing out his own eyes; it seems to me a preferable fate than remembering that abominable visage.
When the path took a turn to the half-right and opened up into a mortar pit, I lay my eyes upon that thing, the source of the carnage. Thing is the only way to describe it; it was tall, its full, gangly height compressed by its crouching over some pool of raw meat. White bones were clearly visible and decaying flesh hung from its limbs and head like a half-eaten chicken leg, swaying in the wind and dangling like some ill-fitting, ragged cloak. It wore no clothing to hide its abhorrent form. Its face, for it was humanoid in the scarcest sense, was mutilated; skin hung from its face in sheets as if ripped off by some diabolical surgeon. Yellow fluid dribbled from its eye sockets onto exposed bone and dark spittle oozed from slack jaws filled with serrated teeth. Its hair, long, stringy, greasy, dripped with black putrefaction, that horrible fluid produced by bodies in the later stages of decay. Its fingers were the length of a forearm and slender like a spring twig; these were covered with ominous, dark fluid. I inherently know it was blood; the scent of a two-pence coin was pungent in the air.
I can hardly transcribe its appearance. My hand shakes whenever I recall that foul creature, a demon in the truest sense.
I look down, and am greeted with what looked closer to a butcher shop than a man who had been alive two hours prior. Blood was scattered about across the mortar pit, intestines small and large strewn about what remained of Corporal Briggs. I know little of anatomy, but knew enough that that pale pink thing might be a lung, that pulsating bit there a heart-- or was it a stomach? Probably a heart-- and oh Christ, look what it did to his throat!
I look up, and unfortunately, it did the same.
It is odd to make contact with something eyeless. My gaze was met not with eyes in the natural sense; rather, these eyes were twin pinpricks of cardinal-red light.
I believe to this day that its eyes burned with hellfire.
For a moment, my mind ceases its natural function. My feet refuse to budge in the prints they’d made in that muck, those horrid graves of the feet. I do not process anything at all but how dread this abomination was as it unfolds slowly, moonlight falling on its sickening form and between its flaps of corroded flesh. As it stretches out, its roughly thirty-foot-tall composition was fully exposed to that unhallowed moonlight. Skin flapped in the breeze like some hideous guidon, its shaggy, putrefacted hair dribbling its nightmarish fluid over the body of my comrade.
I probably screamed. My psyche refuses to acknowledge anything over the next fifteen seconds or so. The first thing I recall that my brain can fathom is firing my Enfield at the creature of the damned as it slowly begins lumbering towards me. It does nothing, only punching a hole through a vacant skull with a puff of some disintegrated bone.
It begins to lumber towards me, and I sprint back through the muck, hoping against hope for somewhere to hide. By God’s grace, I find an artillery bunker and dive in. It might be too big to get inside.
Never had I felt more safe hiding in the enemy’s own foxhole.
I sit back and breathe slowly, leaning against a box of ammunition. I have escaped this monstrosity. My moment of peace disappears, however, when I see its head appear in the doorway, its skull seeming to smile. Its wretchedly long fingers poke through the bunker door and, when they wrap around my boot, I can think of nothing else except to pray.
In the distance, I hear a whining whistle. I knew that sound better than my own voice; it was the sound of incoming British artillery, and never before had I been so glad for an officer to be late or with the wrong kind of shells. As high explosive washes overhead, that demon disappears into the wash of flame with an animalistic bellow. The feeling of peace knowing it is gone is the last thing I recall as I pass out.
I am now in a British psych ward. My platoon had gone too early; I was recovered by another rifle company that cleared the trench section. They did not see the creature, nor the bodies, both consumed by the artillery. They think I am insane because I cannot forget what I have seen. It haunts me. They catch me at night muttering about the thing; it does not leave my dreams. I do not blame that German lad for clawing his own eyes.
I close my notebook. I have finished telling my story; hopefully this may explain why my thoughts never go long without thinking about that monster.
On second thought, it may be for the best that nobody else hears this tale.
31 October, 1916.
I struggle to write on the page as rain comes down softly, pooling in the rim of my helmet and pouring down like a gutter. I tilt my head to my right to redirect the flow and continue writing.
We planned the offensive for midnight. The regiment planned to capture a hill that will break through German lines.
I sit for a minute, struggling for words to say. Two hours until I go over the top; the consequences were not lost on me. I still remember vividly sitting in a shell-hole with my old schoolmate; we’d enlisted together in the war. He’d planned on being a schoolteacher, I an author. He would teach no more, as I had struggled in vain to hold his intestines in his abdomen. I’d lied to his mother when she asked how Victor had died- Quick and painless was the lie I gave.
I cannot help being suspicious of this operation. The Germans have been too quiet lately.
I hadn’t heard gunshots all day. Quite odd; a day without gunshots was like a day without a sunrise. I hadn’t heard anything of German armistice, though.
Corporal Briggs rounds the corner, head low, whistling an out-of-tune rendition of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” He’d been a quartet singer in a prior life, and the way he altered those high notes made the merry tune seem sarcastic and dark, in line with the jaded sense of humor we all have. We share eye contact; his eyes are heavy with grief for a man so young. I wonder if he thinks the same.
“Hour and a half.” He is cold and unemotional as he gives the order, leaning into the trench wall like a gentleman trying to seduce the ladies at a bar. “You ready?”
I nod. “Not many options about it.”
Briggs chuckles softly and lights a cigarette, one of the few remaining joys of trench life. “Well, I’ll leave you to that.”
The anxiety of waiting for my fate turns the seconds to hours, and yet it is still too soon when I hear the order to go over the top.
As I lean against the muddy trench wall, the whining of incoming mortars and the chest-shaking boom of artillery suddenly cease as my pocket watch strikes midnight. A whistle, sharp and ear-piercing, splits the night in the instant of quiet on the western front. I pull myself above the mud embankments, sprinting forward with my Enfield, bayonet fixed.
It is only when I reached a shell hole when I realize that there is silence. For a moment I think I am deaf, and then I hear the sound of the rain cascading down on my helmet. There is no gunfire, no screams, no artillery, only ear-breaking silence.
I weave from foxhole to foxhole, taking cover where I could. I know enough to know never to trust silence—a fickle mistress, here one second and gone in a hail of lead the next. In the darkness, I almost run into a jungle of razor wire. Taking a quick scan of the surroundings, I manage to find a gap in the wire through what little moonlight I had. The flares had yet to arrive.
Just like crossing a street, I look down both sides of the trench I was about to hop into. I can see none of the Kaiser’s men.
No machine guns, no artillery, no rifles, and now no Germans. It seems as if I am fighting the war by myself.
I hop into the trench, and am met with a crunch when my feet hit the ground. I look down, only to be greeted by a prostrate skeleton dressed in German fatigues, with my feet having punched through its rib cage like thin floorboards. A helmet lay close by, a waterlogged photo of a young fraulein floating in the pooled rainwater. A trickle of water pours from a pair of holes in the metal. I look around again, the pale moonlight illuminating harshly the walls of this foreign trench.
The German tunnels are only about 200 meters from the hole in the ground I call home, yet they are totally foreign to me. The mud seems oppressive here, like it too is trying to kill me.
I round the corner and see a German soldier sitting in the muck, his eyes staring blankly ahead, face covered in blood. His helmet was missing, revealing scraggly, filthy blonde hair that barely poked through the filth covering his body. In a knee-jerk reaction, I lunge forward, impaling the soldier. The boy flops over to one side; as he twitches his last, I find it odd how he had made no attempt to fight me. As I inspect the corpse, however, I am filled with shock when my eyes fall across the German’s face.
Suddenly, I encounter a most horrid sight of a German ripped apart by his own hands.
Claw marks riddled the boy’s face, but these marks were not from an animal. The blood on his own fingers confirm that to me. Deep gashes ran across his face, and his eyes were primally ripped to shreds, reduced to giblets of gore. His mouth was agape in a permanent scream and blood oozed from his mouth as if he’d vomited or coughed it up.
I step away from the body, my brain incapable of processing what I just saw, before hearing a heart-stopping scream. Immediately, I sprint towards the sound; it was the only indication of life I’d sensed since I’d gone over the top. I wind through these vacant German trenches in a vain search for some form of human life. If enemy, I could earn my pay; if friendly, I would receive some comfort from this unnerving solitude.
As I sprint down these unfamiliar above-ground catacombs, more and more bodies began to pass. They were likewise mutilated as the one before, but the initial shock of seeing the first one did nothing to lessen the horror of seeing men with caved-in skulls as if struck by a warhammer, limbs ripped off not by artillery but rather like a Christmas turkey, intestines dangling from torsos as if ripped apart by a bear. These mauled corpses become more and more frequent as I sprint down the long, winding passageway.
The horror of seeing all those bodies, though, cannot compare to the mind-altering horror that caused it. I do not blame that boy for clawing out his own eyes; it seems to me a preferable fate than remembering that abominable visage.
When the path took a turn to the half-right and opened up into a mortar pit, I lay my eyes upon that thing, the source of the carnage. Thing is the only way to describe it; it was tall, its full, gangly height compressed by its crouching over some pool of raw meat. White bones were clearly visible and decaying flesh hung from its limbs and head like a half-eaten chicken leg, swaying in the wind and dangling like some ill-fitting, ragged cloak. It wore no clothing to hide its abhorrent form. Its face, for it was humanoid in the scarcest sense, was mutilated; skin hung from its face in sheets as if ripped off by some diabolical surgeon. Yellow fluid dribbled from its eye sockets onto exposed bone and dark spittle oozed from slack jaws filled with serrated teeth. Its hair, long, stringy, greasy, dripped with black putrefaction, that horrible fluid produced by bodies in the later stages of decay. Its fingers were the length of a forearm and slender like a spring twig; these were covered with ominous, dark fluid. I inherently know it was blood; the scent of a two-pence coin was pungent in the air.
I can hardly transcribe its appearance. My hand shakes whenever I recall that foul creature, a demon in the truest sense.
I look down, and am greeted with what looked closer to a butcher shop than a man who had been alive two hours prior. Blood was scattered about across the mortar pit, intestines small and large strewn about what remained of Corporal Briggs. I know little of anatomy, but knew enough that that pale pink thing might be a lung, that pulsating bit there a heart-- or was it a stomach? Probably a heart-- and oh Christ, look what it did to his throat!
I look up, and unfortunately, it did the same.
It is odd to make contact with something eyeless. My gaze was met not with eyes in the natural sense; rather, these eyes were twin pinpricks of cardinal-red light.
I believe to this day that its eyes burned with hellfire.
For a moment, my mind ceases its natural function. My feet refuse to budge in the prints they’d made in that muck, those horrid graves of the feet. I do not process anything at all but how dread this abomination was as it unfolds slowly, moonlight falling on its sickening form and between its flaps of corroded flesh. As it stretches out, its roughly thirty-foot-tall composition was fully exposed to that unhallowed moonlight. Skin flapped in the breeze like some hideous guidon, its shaggy, putrefacted hair dribbling its nightmarish fluid over the body of my comrade.
I probably screamed. My psyche refuses to acknowledge anything over the next fifteen seconds or so. The first thing I recall that my brain can fathom is firing my Enfield at the creature of the damned as it slowly begins lumbering towards me. It does nothing, only punching a hole through a vacant skull with a puff of some disintegrated bone.
It begins to lumber towards me, and I sprint back through the muck, hoping against hope for somewhere to hide. By God’s grace, I find an artillery bunker and dive in. It might be too big to get inside.
Never had I felt more safe hiding in the enemy’s own foxhole.
I sit back and breathe slowly, leaning against a box of ammunition. I have escaped this monstrosity. My moment of peace disappears, however, when I see its head appear in the doorway, its skull seeming to smile. Its wretchedly long fingers poke through the bunker door and, when they wrap around my boot, I can think of nothing else except to pray.
In the distance, I hear a whining whistle. I knew that sound better than my own voice; it was the sound of incoming British artillery, and never before had I been so glad for an officer to be late or with the wrong kind of shells. As high explosive washes overhead, that demon disappears into the wash of flame with an animalistic bellow. The feeling of peace knowing it is gone is the last thing I recall as I pass out.
I am now in a British psych ward. My platoon had gone too early; I was recovered by another rifle company that cleared the trench section. They did not see the creature, nor the bodies, both consumed by the artillery. They think I am insane because I cannot forget what I have seen. It haunts me. They catch me at night muttering about the thing; it does not leave my dreams. I do not blame that German lad for clawing his own eyes.
I close my notebook. I have finished telling my story; hopefully this may explain why my thoughts never go long without thinking about that monster.
On second thought, it may be for the best that nobody else hears this tale.
Matthew Finley is an ROTC cadet from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is currently studying mechanical engineering, and hopes to branch Infantry upon commissioning as
a Second Lieutenant. His hobbies include writing, playing the electric bass, and studying military leadership.
a Second Lieutenant. His hobbies include writing, playing the electric bass, and studying military leadership.